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RECOLLECTIONS OF AN OLD FARM BOY
RECOLLECTIONS OF AN OLD FARM BOY
Until I was in the seventh grade my family operated a grain and livestock farm in the rolling hills of the Palouse country in eastern Washington. Until I was five years old (1928) my father farmed with horses. He had 18 draft horses, about six saddle brood mares, and a stallion called Dempsey after the famous boxer. Like his namesake Dempsey was a vicious fighter as he proved once when he got loose in the barn and attacked the gelding draft horses, but he had a tender side. I would climb up a hayloft ladder in front of his stall, and he would gently nibble my toes without ever biting, which he was very capable of doing. I would give him a gunny sack, and he would shake it exuberantly as if for my amusement. He was gentle with piglets that wandered into his corral, but larger pigs entered at their peril.
Occasionally I would ride Dempsey bareback (with no thought of getting permission), and I can clearly remember how nice it felt to sit on his flat muscled back and enjoy his special smooth rocking gait, which was called "single-footing." He invariably transmitted this gait to his foals, so he was sought after as a sire. (I got my early sex education from watching the breeding events.) When I was riding him, if I saw a horse coming from any distance, I immediately headed for the barn because he had an excessive libido and was difficult to control when he saw another horse.
The principal crops in the Palouse Country were wheat and dry peas. When I was a boy, most of the wheat was threshed with a combine harvester, but there were a few stationary harvesters left. Our neighbor did custom "heading and threshing." A header about 14 feet in length was pushed by six horses. One wheel transmitted power to run the sickle, reel, and the canvas draper that moved the cut grain along and up into a wagon which was pulled by four horses. When the wagon was full, it was driven to the thresher where it was dumped and pitched into the thresher, and another wagon took its place at the header. When the thresher moved, it left long rows of neatly stacked gunny sacks of grain and a huge straw stack. Some of the straw was saved for bedding, but most was burned.
When a threshing crew moved in, it was a dramatic event for a kid seeing all of the men, horses, and machinery operating. They had a big cook wagon where a couple of over-worked women, starting very early in the morning, prepared the food and fed the hungry men three large meals a day. A peak experience for me was when a neighbor invited me to eat in the cook wagon with him and the workers, and the fare included banana pie.
The early combine threshers had a header attached to the thresher. Eighteen good horses were required to pull my father's combine over the Palouse country hills. The driver was perched on a high seat behind the horses and had a box of clods that he could throw at any slackers. In addition to the driver there was a header tender, machine tender, sack sewer, and sometime a sack "jig" to hand filled sacks to the sack sewer. After harvesting, a couple of men loaded the sacks on to a truck to be hauled to the warehouse. (Today one person operates a self-propelled harvester (with an air-conditioned cab) and another person drives the bulk truck to the elevator. If its a long haul, a second truck may be parked in the field to be loaded until the driver returns the first truck.)
The transient farm workers were not great role models for farm boys. They often related experiences and told stories that were hardly suitable for young ears. Almost all of them smoked or chewed tobacco or used "snoose," (Copenhagen snuff.) Smokeless tobacco had the advantage of not being a fire hazard during harvest. I simulated chewing tobacco by taking big chews of raisins on which the tooth decay germs thrived. (I have several crowns to prove it.) One day a hired man offered me a chew of the real thing, which I glady accepted to my great regret. One day I got my finger nail removed when the truck door was closed on it, and the medication administered was the hired man's freshly chewed wad of tobacco. It was touted for its healing power, but it was a revolting therapy. Most of the men smoked Bull Durham "roll your own" tobacco. My friend and I tried rolling "Indian tobacco" ("curled dock" seed that looked like tobacco) in newspaper. It smoldered, but it was hardly a Marlboro man's smoke.
We milked about six cows and sold sour cream, which paid for most of the groceries. The milk was poured into a cream separator that was powered by my brother or me. Most of the nonfat milk, which we called "blue bore," was fed to calves, hogs, and cats. It wasn't regarded as fit for human consumption without adding back the cream. In those early days I didn't much milking, but I enjoyed squirting milk at the cats who hated to get squirted but held their ground to get the milk.
We fell heir to a nanny goat whose kid died, so we got an orphan lamb and held the goat while the lamb nursed. When the pet lamb grew to the appropriate size, it became lamb chops. There was no room for sentimentality on the farm.
During the summer and fall after milking in the morning the cows were turned out on the road to graze along the road bank. My job was to round them up on my pony for milking in the evening. There were several roads for the cows to take, and I had to guess which one. Occasionally it was pitch dark before I got them to the barn.
One morning when we went to the horse barn there was a shepherd dog inside, who was delighted to see us. We didn't know where he came from, but he found a home. Shep assisted me in moving the cattle. Most dogs naturally go to a cow's head and bark, but Shep was a natural healer meaning that he would dash in and nip a cow on the heals and drop to the ground to avoid being kicked. Shep was a good helper and companion, but unfortunately he chased the hired man's motorcycle and then went for larger game consisting of cars on the highway and got run over.
Farm boys were faced with plenty of hazards. When I was in the second grade, I was whittling on a stick with my sharp pocket knife during recess at school, and I made a 1-1/2 inch-long incision in the base of my thumb. I kept my hand in my pocket, but the country school teacher suspected that something was wrong and had me expose my bloody hand. I wasn't taken to a doctor, but the wound healed well leaving a prominent scar recording the incident. A pocket knife was standard equipment for a farm boy. When I was four years old, I ran off to school, barged into the classroom, confronted my brother, and demanded that he hand over my pocket knife that he had taken to school.
Two brothers that were classmates in my school were swimming in a deep dangerous pool in the Palouse River and drowned. This was a great shock for our school since their were only about ten pupils before their passing.
When I was in the third grade, we had a snow white mare named Sparkle. She was an excellent cow-horse because of her cow-sense and agility in following a dodging and weaving critter. It was best to use a saddle to help stay aboard during her quick maneuvers. She had one serious problem. She went berserk when she heard unfamiliar noises. The hired men couldn't even roll a cigarette on her because of the sound of the rustling paper. I rode her to school bareback one day and carried a lunch bucket with a bottle of fruit in it. On the way home, I jumped her across a creek to check some ground squirrel traps that I had set. The empty bottle in the bucket rattled, and Sparkle very quickly parted company with me. I landed on my lunch bucket which crumpled exposing a sharp edge that removed the end of my thumb. On that occasion I was taken to the doctor for repair, but I was left with a shortened thumb as a lasting reminder of Sparkle.
One day a neighbor boy was visiting, and for a little excitement we decided to ride calves in the coral in which the baked ground was nearly as hard as concrete. I don't remember how long it took to get on the calf, but it didn't take long for it to throw me off on my head causing a minor concussion. My mother saw me and got alarmed because I couldn't remember what grade I was in. I have a neck condition that occasionally bothers me that probably resulted from that episode.
Somehow we obtained a pair of climbers that linemen use to climb poles. One day I strapped them on and climbed about 18 feet up a column in the haymow. Sinking a spur into the timber was easy going up, but I discovered that it was not so easy going down. I felt like a kitten that scrambles up the drapes to discover that he can't get down. I got down, but I didn't put the climbers on again. That incident reminds me of when I was about four, and I climbed out on a limb of a big tree. When I saw how far it was down to the ground, I froze and had to be rescued.
Speaking of hazards on the farm, one night Dad was taking a bath and the water was a little too hot, so he asked me to bring him some cold water. I brought him a pot of cold water and impetuously dumped it on him, and then hearing his response, took off running. Fortunately, by the time he finished his bath, he dropped the idea of tanning my hide.
We lived in a strange house. It was one of the biggest houses in the country when it was built; it had an enormous parlor and two bedrooms that we never furnished. It was very ornate, but there was no central heat, no running water in the bath room, and no hot running water in the kitchen. The water was heated with the wood range and held in a reservoir. We had to use a privy supplied with old Sears catalogs. You really, really had to go before using the out-house on a cold, stormy winter night.
When I was in the fourth grade, my father bought a very pretty pinto shetland pony, but she had been teased and tormented by town kids, which made her mean. She would strike with her front feet, kick, bite, and when ridden she would often kick up her heals to try to throw us off. On the road she would also make a quick side-step (called shying) as if startled by something and dump us on the gravel. My mother feared for our safety, but Topsy soon settled down and became my transportation. She would eat anything offered to her including pie. Although she became very gentle, she never did allow the hired men to ride her. She would pitch them off as fast as they could get on.
My brother and I built a cart for Topsy, and we made a harness for her by cutting up a trotting horse harness that Dad had but never used. However, that fact did not reduce his displeasure over our brazenly cutting up his harness. A road crew was working by the farm, and I loaded a box of apples into the new cart and handed them out to the crew. This act of generosity did not please my mother, to say the least, who was intending to use those special apples to make pies. Once we drove Topsy to school, and on the way she expressed her displeasure with the cart by kicking up her heels while peeing on us, and pulling the cart into a ditch. She made her point, but we continued on to school.
Our country school was a one-room school house, and in my last year there were only four students. There was an unstated absolute "no child left behind" policy in which every child learned to read on time with the help of a liberal dose of phonics. (This was the time when phonics was being replaced by the look-say method in city schools.) I did very little outside book reading connected with school, but Dad had a home veterinary book entitled "The Diseases of Horse" that was my reading of choice.
Just before school started in the fall, my mother took my brother and me to the J.C.Penney store and outfitted us with new overalls or (later on) jeans, blue work shirts, and work shoes. (On the first day of school every boy had on a new pair overalls with the legs rolled up. They shrank and we grew so that they eventually became the right length.) We also got our supply of pencils, crayons, and paper and were ready for school which was not a happy day after a summer on the farm.
Our winters at that time were severe with a couple of weeks of deep snow and sub-zero temperatures. My father would put a bed of straw in a bobsled, cover my brother and me with a heavy horsehide blanket, and take us to school with bells jingling on the horses' harnesses.
We had about six or eight fecund brood sows, which produced about eight piglets per litter. The growing pigs rooted in the field and wallowed in the mud as pigs should be free to do rather than being caged on factory farms. They were finished with grain, and when they reached two hundred pounds, they were hauled to market. In the winter, when the snow was on, we would butcher about three hogs. This involved heating a large vat of water over a wood fire to scald the hair off with some hard scraping. Farmers cut up the carcasses so that the loin went into sausage instead of pork chops, which yielded super delicious sausage, larger hams, and back ribs. Along with the ham, bacon, or sausage we had hot biscuits with jam or honey and eggs and fried potatoes. The hams and bacon were hung in the smoke house producing a memorable aroma. Cured ham was a popular meat because we didn't have refrigeration required to keep fresh meat. We didn't even have an icebox. When mother wanted to fry chicken, she would start heating the water to scald the feathers off, and we would catch a young rooster and chop his head off. I also had to take my turn at that grisly job.
We didn't eat fancy on the farm, but we certainly ate well. My mother canned copious amounts of fruit and vegetables, made special things like cheddar cheese and head cheese from pigs heads, pickles, and at the same time cooked for the family plus hired men, packed school lunches, cleaned house, and laundered lots of dirty clothes using soap that she made. She baked all of our bread, and to come home from school and eat a heal from a warm loaf slathered with butter and homemade jam was high living for a hungry kid.
When I was about 11, I convinced Dad's friend that I could drive his car. We lived on a hill with a long lane going down the hill to the county road. I started down the hill and found that my legs were too short to push hard enough on the brake peddles, and to make matters worse, the car had poor mechanical brakes. At the bottom of the hill we were moving at a good clip, and I had to make a sharp left turn on to the highway. When we reached our destination a half-mile down the road, the car's owner was still doubled up with laughter, and I was shaking like a leaf and saw nothing funny about the incident.
We had experiences on the farm which we regarded as recreation like fishing in the Palouse River for suckers or shooting the messy English sparrows in the barn with a 22-caliber rifle, but horseback riding was regarded as transportation to get to school or to bring in the cattle. There were a lot of chores to do the year around as well as seasonal jobs. One of the most onerous jobs was stacking wood. My father would dump a huge truckload of fire wood in our combination woodshed and garage, and my brother and I would have to clear away a place to start stacking and then stack the wood up to the roof. Hoeing weeds in the garden was another downer along with pulling wild mustard in the wheat fields and cutting potatoes for planting. There were some jobs where a boy's help was especially important such as riding the horse that pulled up the Jackson fork that raised the hay from a wagon up to a track that went into the hay mow, raking hay with a team of horses, or tending header on the combine.
The farm was a wonderful place for boys to learn to work and to develop basic skills. My father had a shop with hand tools for rough carpentry and a forge and other blacksmith equipment. One day my brother and I fired up the forge, helped ourselves to a steel rod, cut it up, and made punches and chisels. What our roughly crafted tools lacked in quality, we made up for in quantity.
For entertainment in the evenings we often played cards or checkers. At 8:00 pm we listened to Amos and Andy, and its ending was the non-negotiable signal for bedtime for my brother and me. Radio broadcasts of the heavy-weight boxing matches were eagerly looked forward to, raptly listened to, and thoroughly discussed the next day. There was very little outside entertainment. During the Depression people took turns in moving out much of their furniture and holding house dances. The popular beverages were moonshine followed eventually by steaming hot black coffee. We saw an occasional movie. Shortly after I was born silent movies ended; I only saw one. My favorite movie star was Will Rogers.
In 1928 my father sold his draft horses and bought a Caterpillar crawler tractor. It couldn't quite pull the combine over some of the hills, so he bought a smaller tractor to help it out among other uses. To better utilize the equipment, he rented more land. This was a very bad time to mechanize and expand because the Depression was about to devastate agriculture. In 1934 the Bank took everything but his truck, so he started trucking for a living.
When I was 13, Dad had bought a larger truck that I would often start up and move around. I figured out the six-speed shift pattern, but I never drove it on the road. Dad had picked up a seed drill for a friend and needed to deliver it to his farm, which was about thirty miles away and on a major highway. My father couldn't be available to do it, so he told my mother to accompany me as I drove the truck to make the delivery. She was a licensed driver but couldn't drive the truck. How he convinced my sensible mother to go along with that preposterous idea is a mystery to me. Fortunately, this driving experience went better than my first one since the truck had power brakes. It wouldn't have been pleasant if a highway patrolman had spotted a 13-year-old boy driving that big truck through town or on the highway, and he wouldn't have been impressed by the fact that my mother was with me.
My transportation at that point in my life was a bicycle, so my father sold Topsy. The buyer came and with chewing gum induced her into the back seat of his two-door Ford sedan, which was a very tight fit, and hauled her away leaving behind a lot of memories and closing out a special chapter in my life.
After Topsy was sold, as a speculation Dad bought a Belgian draft stallion that weighed nearly a ton. He was much calmer than Dempsey and didn't mind being ridden, so I rode the giant around the neighborhood without worrying about other horses. When farming with horses was common, some small entrepreneurs rode or led draft horse stallions around the country to service the draft mares.
When I was 14, my grandfather got too old to operate his farm, so my father rented the farm and took over his cattle, draft horses, and antiquated equipment. During the first summer my uncle moved his combine in to harvest our wheat. Setting up the combine consisted of attaching the header to the combine. I was carrying a crowbar and a big wrench, which I laid on the draper at the end of the header. The drive shaft was attached to the header, but we had difficulty getting other parts to match up. My uncle decided that it would help to level up the machine, so he started it up. Very shortly we heard a sickening crash inside of the machine. Yes, the crowbar and wrench had gone into the cylinder, which had rows of three-inch teeth, and caused considerable damage. My uncle really chewed me out, but I thought he was equally culpable for starting the machine without seeing that all was clear. My objection was over-ruled. When we finally started harvesting, my job was tending header, which meant raising and lowering it as dictated by the height of the stalks.
The following summer Dad worked off the farm, and my brother and I did the farming. We milked the cows, cut and filled two barns with hay, and made a large haystack. We bound some oats with an ancient binder pulled by four horses to see what binding was like, and I plowed about 40 acres with an six-horse team and a two-bottom plow. My only mishap was tipping over a loaded hay wagon but without serious consequences. We got to experience a bucolic kind of farming that had ended in the Palouse country. That farming venture didn't last long, and we moved to Pullman, which was fortunate for my future because that is the location of Washington State University.
When I was 16, I got a summer harvest job for which I was wholly unqualified. A farmer that my brother knew needed a sack-sewer (whose job it was to hang sacks on a hopper on a combine, jig the sacks to fully fill them, sew the sacks shut, and dump them at appropriate places). I had seen sack-sewers work on the farm, but I had never sewn a single sack. I practiced throwing a double half-hitch with string, which is a necessary skill to start and finish each sack. The farmer was harvesting dry peas, which fortunately don't come out as fast as wheat, so I managed to get the job done without embarrassing myself.
When we started combining wheat, he didn't need a sack-sewer because the wheat was bulk handled. His health was not good because of being gassed in WWI, so he assigned me to take over as the machine tender. When things were going well, this job was mostly to keep the machine level as it was pulled around the hills. One day we made a downhill U-turn on a steep hillside with the tractor moving too rapidly, and the long, heavy combine clutch lever was thrown to the right disengaging the clutch, which stopped my leveling operation at an extremely crucial point. I happened to see what occurred and dashed forward and re-engaged the clutch, which continued the leveling and may have saved the machine from rolling into the header. I guess in a way I redeemed myself for having initiated the damage caused to my uncle's machine, but that scary experience was so vividly etched in my mind that it still seems like yesterday. Rolling a combine into the header was one of the worst accidents that could occur on Palouse country wheat farms.
The vivid memories of my childhood on a farm are only equaled by my experiences in the Army including the Battle of the Bulge but are more pleasant to recall even though there were a few bumps in the road. For better or for worse our way of life on the farm is gone. Now farmers in my old neighborhood live in big to huge modern houses, have no cows, pigs, chickens, or other livestock, may or may not have a garden, and use very expensive modern farm machinery to get the work done very quickly and easily. Thanks to Federal farm programs they have been protected from plummeting commodity prices that wiped out my father in the Depression.
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